Climate, technology and chaos Blog

First let me be clear I am no Buber expert, so everything I say may be wrong, but this is really a more general point.

I have in previous blogs said that I find the idea of binaries, over-common, and intellectually dangerous for several reasons.

1) Binaries tend to be conceived as opposites or negations,

However very few processes negate each other. Let us take a common binary: men and women. These categories are often conceived as opposites. Men are rational/women are emotional, men are aggressive/women are passive, men are tall/women are short. Whatever the level of plausibility here, there is lots of overlap, and the binary misses it, or even conceals it. For example while the ‘average man’ is taller than the ‘average woman’, it is not that difficult to find women taller than the average man, and men shorter than the average women. These short men or tall women are not, not-men, or not-women. The variation is not categorical but statistical. The same is almost certainly true of rational and emotive, or aggressive and passive.

Likewise the category of ‘not-woman’ contains a lot more creatures than just men: sharks, elephants, cows, bacteria, gum trees and so on. Men do not exhaust the entire category of not-women. So the category is not even logically sufficient or illuminating. Men are not the negation of women, or the opposite of women, or vice versa. The binary conceals a much more complex and shifting reality.

2) Binaries tend to have one pole made significant or dominant

This point was made by de Beauvoir although many people will attribute it to Derrida.

Using the man/woman binary again as an example, it has been standard practice to take the male as exemplary of the human, saying ‘Man’, ‘Mankind’, using the pronoun ‘he’ to include everyone, or using the term ‘the opposite sex’ to mean ‘female’, because male is supposedly the natural default sex. And of course, the male is supposed to dominate the female naturally. So the binary tends to inculcate, and indicate, dominance and passivity, or significance and lesser-significance. It lessens the chance of a mutual I-thou relationship.

Surprise?

The continual reduction to binaries, might be considered surprising when the dominant religion in the West supposedly believes that God is a trinity, and that its sacred text talks about the human triad of flesh, spirit (pneuma) and soul (psyche). Spirit and soul have been made the same, so we can have the binary of mind and body, spirit and body, mind/matter etc, with the mind/spirit dominant over, and more important than, the body, which can be dismissed and transcended.

This kind of binary might help people think their real life is in the spiritual world or ‘heaven’, and to dismiss the planet that they live on, as being inferior, and of little concern.

The solution?

Look for the third….. This is not the Hegelian or Marxist third which can be reduced to the synthesis of the original two, or a mediation between the two, but another factor altogether which co-exists with the original binary. Let’s be clear we are not limited to three, but the four tends to be reduced to binary oppositions again, so if we recognise a four, let us aim for a five…..

The Buber binary

The Buber binary is the two relations I-thou and I-it, of which the I-thou is primary.

The It-Authority relationship

I would suggest that there is at least one other possible relationship which adds to our understanding of human life. That is the It-Authority relationship. In which the ‘I’ becomes an ‘it’ in the face of authority, and there is no thou.

Before authority we are to quail, obey, stop thinking and side with the authority, or else we are to be crushed without remorse. We become instruments of the authority, without comment, or with only minor comment. The authority is not a subject and neither are we, there is no interaction other than authority’s instruction and our pleading or acquiescence.

Of course we can rebel, but we often rebel within the format of the It, just being resistant, not taking back our, or others’ ‘thouness’.

I would suggest that many people’s relationship to God is of the form It-Authority, were God is the authority, the rules, the punishments and blandishments, applied with no input from the human. This is the God who needs an eternal hell. I suspect that this is not a healthy relationship, or even a relationship at all – even if people pretend it is, so as to placate their God and hope to get on its good side, for fear of the alternative.

The It-Authority relationship seems common in sites of neoliberal employment, in which employees are an inconvenient cost centre, to be controlled, restructured and dismissed as ‘it’s, with little to no real valued input into the process….

I also suggest that the political response to ecological crisis is often conditioned by an It-Authority relationship to ‘the market’. This is the religion of the market, in which the market is neither recognised as being both made by humans, and made politically, but gets taken as a force in itself; an Authority, superior to the ecology in which it is actually immersed. The market is taken as an authority with which there is no appeal, and which will not be placated – unless it is to help out those who are already sanctified by the market, such as fossil fuel companies. This market reduces people and the world to ‘it’s, and treats them accordingly.

It makes the crisis even harder to deal with.

Tags: ethics, neoliberalism, philosophy, religion

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